PIRATE: A Remotely-Operable Telescope Facility for Research and Education

Abstract

We introduce PIRATE, a new remotely-operable telescope facility for use in research and education, constructed from 'off-the-shelf' hardware, operated by The Open University. We focus on the PIRATE Mark 1 operational phase where PIRATE was equipped with a widely- used 0.35m Schmidt-Cassegrain system (now replaced with a 0.425m corrected Dall Kirkham astrograph). Situated at the Observatori Astronomic de Mallorca, PIRATE is currently used to follow up potential transiting extrasolar planet candidates produced by the SuperWASP North experiment, as well as to hunt for novae in M31 and other nearby galaxies. It is operated by a mixture of commercially available software and proprietary software developed at the Open University. We discuss problems associated with performing precision time series photometry when using a German Equatorial Mount, investigating the overall performance of such 'off-the-shelf' solutions in both research and teaching applications. We conclude that PIRATE is a cost-effective research facility, and also provides exciting prospects for undergraduate astronomy. PIRATE has broken new ground in offering practical astronomy education to distance-learning students in their own homes.

Accepted for publication in PASP. 14 pages, 11 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Achieving better than 1 minute accuracy in the Heliocentric and Barycentric Julian Dates
• Efficient identification of exoplanetary transit candidates from SuperWASP light curves
• A fast hybrid algorithm for exoplanetary transit searches
• New periodic variable stars coincident with ROSAT sources discovered using SuperWASP
• Rejecting Astrophysical False Positives from the TrES Transiting Planet Survey: The Example of GSC 03885-00829
• Software architecture for an unattended remotely controlled telescope

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